Princeton Weekly Bulletin May 11, 1998
Graduate students staff Web Factory
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A recent initiative of the PLACE (Princeton Laboratory for Advancing Curricular Excellence, at 87 Prospect St.), Web Factory sends graduate students hired and trained by Computing and Information Technology to help faculty learn to put their course materials on the Web. "Our mission is to empower faculty to use new media -- meaning digital media -- in their courses," says David Herrington, manager of the PLACE. This academic year Web Factory is responsible for 54 course pages.
While faculty members have asked about putting materials on the Web for some time, Web Factory is "proactive, an outreach program," according to Wendy Chun, a graduate student in English who coordinates the program for CIT. Part of Chun's effort has been to recruit nine other graduate students and supervise their training.
Says Herrington, "Wendy took it from an informal thing where faculty came over here to ask questions, to a program that provides graduate student instructor-helpers who go to the professor's office to work on the project." Chun calls the latter service, appropriately enough, "the office visit." She points out a benefit for the graduate students as well as for the faculty: "Since graduate students at Princeton don't teach their own courses, working with a faculty member on a Web page gives an opportunity to see how a course is created, to think about assignments and syllabi. It can be part of the training of graduate students."
CourseWare
Central to Web Factory is software called CourseWare, an automated course home page builder, developed by CIT's Serge Goldstein, George Fleming and Chun. It asks for basic information such as department, title, place of meeting, course description and requirements.
Course Web pages can exist on many levels of complexity, Herrington points out. "They may simply include basic information and the course syllabus. Or they may offer additional content such as problem sets, Web resources, e-mail links and the like."
Though CIT e-mailed all faculty members about Web Factory ("If you are interested in putting your course materials on the Web, but need some help getting started..."), many people were reached "by word of mouth," says Chun.
Reductions in confusion
Herrington emphasizes that Web Factory "doesn't cost academic departments anything." It does take a faculty member's time -- the amount of time depending on the person, the course and the materials.
It can also save time, according to Professor of English James Richardson, who set up a page for his Contemporary Poetry course with the help of Web Factory. English graduate student Steven Nardi "taught me how to set the page up in about an hour and a half. I've maintained it myself since then," Richardson says. "I haven't been that imaginative in using it -- though I've got links to some poetry sites on the Web (Steven did those).
"The main advantages for me," he notes, "have been tremendous reductions in confusion and paper-handling. When there's a handout, I put it on the Web. I don't have to make 70 copies, there isn't a lot of confusion passing it around at the beginning of lecture, and I don't have to take copies to the next lecture for those who weren't there the first time. And nobody who loses a syllabus needs to come to me for one; they just download another copy."
Songs by Chumbawamba
A recent Web Factory alumnus is Instructor in History Frank Trentmann, who has created a Web page for his lecture course on Modern Britain, Empire and Ireland.
The course, he says, explores "the social, cultural and political transformations in the lives of women and men in Britain from the 18th century to the present." Trentmann's CIT guide through the electronic forest was Greg Lyon, a graduate student in history.
Before Web Factory, Trentmann "knew what a Web page was, and knew people had them," he says, but he had no idea how to build one himself. He responded to the Web Factory e-mail message from CIT because he wanted to make material available to the students beyond the copied selection of readings. For graphic images, "Sometimes copy reproduction isn't very good," he says, "and, if you want to do anything in color, the cost is prohibitive. Forget Gainsborough!"
Because CIT can scan images (including film and video) and digitize sound, Trentmann's course Web page now offers images -- such as Hogarth engravings and photographs of punks and Princess Diana; maps, graphs, complex diagrams and charts; and music. "In class I can only play a couple of minutes of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Sea Symphony and discuss it with students," he says. Through a link on the web syllabus, "students can hear the entire last movement."
Trentmann points out that it is also possible to create links to materials that exist elsewhere on the Web. "For example," he says, "the map of the British Isles is accessed through the on-line Encyclopedia Britannica." Again, to complement the examination of contemporary British culture, students hear songs by Chumbawamba, a contemporary band that styles itself "pop anarchist." There is a link to Chumbawamba's own Web page, "which offers lyrics to all their songs and links to underground popular political newsletters."
Without Lyon's technical help, says Trentmann, "I could never have done this; it's not as easy as it looks."
What is possible
Lyon sees his job as "helping the professors understand their Web pages, so they can maintain them. At the first meeting, I discuss what is possible and try to get them thinking about what they want to achieve with the Web page. Some want very simple things, like having the syllabus available for both their students and for colleagues at other institutions. Others, like Frank Trentmann, want images scanned and texts made available so students have a richer new media experience."
In the second meeting, says Lyon, "We set up the basic Web site, including the syllabus and basic information; the professor does this;
I only coach. I try to make it as easy as possible for the professors themselves to realize their ideas about the site. That means arranging things to be scanned, being available for help," and, inevitably, "fixing things that would take longer to explain than to fix myself."
Students seem to respond favorably to the Web presence. Says Michael D'Alba '98, "I can't make the argument that it necessarily helps me learn more. It does help me learn more efficiently. When I wanted a map of Britain to study for the midterm, for instance, I went to the Web site from my computer rather than to the atlas in the Firestone reference room. That saved me some time over the course of the day."
Responsibility for proper use
While Trentmann is "not a fanatic about the possibilities of Web use," he does believe that "It is the responsibility of academics to put things on the Web that are useful to students and to utilize this medium for proper historical research and teaching."
However, he cautions, "There is a lot of misinformation on the Web -- unauthorized translations, for example -- and that can encourage poor research." And while online graphic and auditory materials are useful, he says, "For a small seminar I'd still prefer to take the class into Firestone and look at primary sources -- for example, manuscripts of Cruikshank illustrations. But you can't do that with 55 people."
Faculty members who wish to investigate CourseWare should check out http://www.princeton.edu/WebFactory. Those wishing to know more about Web Factory should e-mail place@princeton.edu or phone 258-6073.
A Web Factory "office visit," says Chun, goes a long way toward making faculty members "comfortable with new technology."